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Monday, 21 November 2011

Provoking behaviour: training roleplayers at assessment centres

Assessment days for evaluating work-relevant behaviours of
applicants or job incumbents often draw on actors to perform as difficult
team-members or curious clients in meeting simulations. A recent study has
shown that these role-playing actors can be trained to effectively weave pre-written
dialogue prompts into the improvised simulations. However, whether this helps
measurement of participant behaviours is less clear.

The study authors Eveline Schollaert and Filip Lievens gave
19 role-players training, which in one condition included explicit guidance on
using behaviour-eliciting prompts during assessment exercises; for example,
"Mention that you feel bad about it" in order to provoke behaviours
relating to a dimension of interpersonal sensitivity. Such prompts are often provided in prep material, but actual usage was unknown. The authors wondered whether
role-players could realistically increase their prompt usage through training, or whether this is
too much to ask an actor in the thick of a dynamic interaction.

At a subsequent assessment centre, the role-players
interacted in simulations with 233 students from Ghent University. Role-players
with prompt training were able to incorporate four to five times more prompts
than those without such training, an increase from about two prompts per
exercise to 10-12.

More prompts ought to elicit more relevant behaviours, so the
authors expected observers to get a better picture of true 'candidate'
performance. But this isn't clear. In the high-prompt condition, pairs of
raters watching the same role-play didn't agree any more on their ratings,
suggesting the behaviours remained just as obscured as without prompts. That
said, there was better correspondence of some of the ratings to other measurements
you would expect to be related - for instance, interpersonal sensitivity
correlated better with an Agreeableness personality score acquired pre-centre.
But half of the predicted increases in correlation weren't observed.

Regarding their unsupported hypotheses, the authors wonder
whether the rating assessors should also have been trained on prompt use to
encourage sensitivity to candidate reactions. I have additional concerns on the
nature of the assessors -minimally trained masters students - used to draw
conclusions about a professionalised domain. Nonetheless, this rare examination
of role-player impact on face to face assessments suggests training can
generate more dimension-focused contributions, which in turn may result in
measurements with more predictive power.

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